Earlier this year a number of our sites tanked and when I say tanked I mean THEY TANKED. Not only did visits dry up, as a result of their rankings evaporating, but all toolbar PageRank disappeared reverting to n/a. I'm talking a site with a homepage toolbar PR 7 showing PR n/a! It was a very strange experience, made all the more strange by the fact that sites that ranked on pure age (been there since god was a boy with decent content) tanked alongside sites we'd worked on.

Like most people reading this, I work in the search marketing industry. However, the people who pay me don't; they are invariably business owners who for the most part don't get search marketing, social media, face-in or linked-book - did you see what I did there? Most of these poor souls are totally confused and confusion can lead to suspicion which in turn can lead to poor or broken relationships.

We've always concentrated on giving people the things and information they need, or at least what we believed they wanted and needed. The end result is that although we're a small company based in North East Scotland (in the middle of nowhere) we work with businesses all over the world.

Thanks Nick. Straightforward communication so important yet often lacking in technical fields. Speaking to clients in language they can understand is a great way of winning people over and a powerful sales tool.

Perhaps the most difficult conversations though are with people who have been given bad information from someone they trust, that can be really testing!

You make a good point. One of the hardest things to communicate is the fact SEO isn't something you 'fix'. Some people genuinely believe their SEO is broken and once fixed they will shoot to the top of Google!

Hey SEODinosaur, you are 100% on the money with this approach. Getting clients on board and being realistic about what can be achieved makes sense on every level. It's great to know so many Mozzers agree with this approach! August 21, 2012

Thanks George. Like you we get enquiries from people who heard things and have a firm, although usually incorrect, idea about SEO and what's achievable. One of the biggest challenges is people saying things like "how long will it take to get to number 1 for 'some competitive keyword'". These guys often have unrealistic expectations to manage :)August 21, 2012

Thanks for the feedback Mat. I agree it's a tricky question to answer using a one size fits all approach. We get a mostly positive response across the board when we point people at SEOMan but I appreciate he's not everyone's cup of tea :)August 21, 2012

I'm at a loss on how to respond to this. The IP address was in the RBL, our server used the RBL look up service and blocked it. The error code the FAG tool gave was the error code our server was set to show visits from IP addresses in the RBL. These are the facts.

Situations like this focus your mind, or so I found. I was banging my head off a wall then sat down, took a moment and looked at the problem logically. I remembered about the FAG tool and bingo, it all became clear. I got my server guy to investigate and he quickly unearthed the issue.

It because we monitor sites that we found the issue :) But remember, the sites and the server were all working fine. It was the fact Google's spider IP address was in the RBL that caused Google to be blocked. We were 'penalised' for doing the right thing :)

Perhaps one ROI is the business improvement that comes about as a result of having to interact more with customers (happy ones and unhappy ones). Businesses that learn from disgruntled customers become stronger, a stronger business will be more successful (I would have thought).

Think of social media as a free (as in consultant free) means of achieving business performance improvement. If you take social media away these businesses are still going to have unhappy customers only these customers would simply talk "in private". The business would be getting hurt without knowing it.

Panda was a change for the better as it removed low cost low quality spam from the SERP. However, although I can't think of an alternative, Google's automated link based ranking system is fundamentally flawed and favours organisations with budgets. That's fine so long as users know this but by enlarge they don't. They assume Google is showing them the best results.

We need diversity in the search market and that will come as the web becomes more and more normal - I know it's normal for people reading this but it isn't for many others.

The link based algo has always been about earned links, nothing new there. The change, as we all know, is Google's ability to distinguish between earned links and unearned links. The challenge for businesses is they are not accustomed to earning attention, even small businesses are more used to buying it.

When talking to most businesses about the link based algo I see a glazed (and dazed) expression from the person I'm talking to, often followed by "well these guys are number 1 for **insert phrase here** and they haven't got great content".

Link earning is anathema to most non savvy business folk and people like us who try and educate them are often banging our heads against a wall, and the reason why? People (including me) love Google but Google is fundamentally flawed just like PR (public relations) is fundamentally flawed. In PR the company with the biggest mouthpiece (and deepest pockets) often wins, in search it's again coming down to deep pockets because great content isn't something many small businesses can stretch to.

As others have said, it's not likely to change any time soon but it's tough and getting tougher and although killing off cheap link schemes is great, perhaps all this means is expensive link schemes will work take over. After all, if a company invests in great content (because it can) resulting in links and dominance on the SERP's, does that make its products the best/best value? Does that make its services the best/best value? Nope.

Rand spoke of curated lists and perhaps people will head back to these curated lists as their faith in what they thought was an unbiased list (Google's SERP's) starts to wane.

You're pointing at the elephant in the room, as is this post IMHO. The link based method of establishing quality doesn't apply to many websites and this is why site owners have to jump through hoops - using for example, the techniques described here.

Google will never acknowledge this because that would be an acknowledgement of their flawed business model. When I say flawed I'm obviously not suggesting it isn't successful but, their recent high profile posturing with respect to links is going to raise this problem with many people who hadn't previously 'got it'. It could well be an own goal they will come to regret.

As in politics, where search is concerned the successful candidates are often those with the biggest budgets, not the candidates best suited to satisfy the needs of the people they serve. Increasingly this particular penny is starting to drop. It's all getting very interesting.

Sadly, Google's link based algo is fundamentally flawed and incapable of differentiating between good content and bad. If you need proof search for anything. Google's search also has its roots in academia, where citations are common currency and encouraged, there's actually a genuine need for them. Extrapolating this into the world of business and commerce is a nonsense. As someone above has said, who's going to link to a site about toilets or socks!

In the Google founders paper The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, as presented at WWW7 in Brisbane, Australia, the guys explained, and I quote "The Google search engine has two important features that help it produce high precision results. First, it makes use of the link structure of the Web to calculate a quality ranking for each web page. This ranking is called PageRank and is described in detail in [Page 98]. Second, Google utilizes links to improve search results." So there you have it, right at the heart of the Google algo circa 1998.

Just in case you missed it, so far as Google is concerned a page with no links has no quality (notwithstanding domain strength - thanks SEOMoz).

So where does this leave us? Well, site owners hire SEO's, SEO's realise their client's site is going to struggle to earn links, they also recognise Google needs link signals to rank the site's pages and so it goes on. Furthermore, site owners can spend time and energy creating great content only to find nobody links to it, because mere mortals don't even know what a link is, let alone how to create one. It's a quite incredible vicious circle and Google sits in the middle pontificating, never quite having the integrity to accept their algorithm is busted.

There's also another uncomfortable truth. Any link a site owner or their SEO plays any part in securing, is not a genuine merit base link, sorry about that. Need proof? OK, when was the last time you saw a Matt Cutts video explaining what kind of link building Google are comfortable with? I'm guessing never because the Google millionaires only ever tell people to build great websites and hope others like it enough to link to it. But remember, the overwhelming majority of web users wouldn't know how to link to something if they wanted to.

Blog networks, full of spun garbage, add no value to the web, and thankfully they leave a footprint that ensures they can be devalued. However, what about all the garbage stand alone blogs, living off other people's hard work, yes, I'm talking about that white hat world of wonder that is the guest blogging phenomena. Have you ever looked at some of these? These guys are like the fat kid in the playground who the cool kids suck up to while he has sweets/candy to share. Many (most?) are complete garbage but as they have no footprint Google can't devalue them, at least not yet.

If Google had its way nobody would ever ask for a link or create content with a link in it to stick on someone else's blog. The only links that existed would be those that web masters, for it is these mystical beasts who have the skills, added to their sites because they believed the content they were linking to was worthy of a link. The thing is, who's to say these people know good content from bad. There's many a single minded mob have been so wrong it hurts.

I've no idea where this is all heading. No doubt the SEO glitterati will write article after article explaining all the latest 'white hat' link building strategies, but it's mostly hot air in my view. Ultimately, someone who creates a great site, in their niche, has no way of ensuring it's recognised unless they build links, and if they build links they are in breach of Google's T&C's. What a mess....

For me the real value of this survey is the way it endorses our approach and fee structures. SEO is still a relatively new industry and fees vary from the $99 scammers through to the "we only service big corp" $50k a month brigade. Like many we service a range of clients and I'm not more comfortable than ever we are on the money......in every sense.

Perhaps the title of this article is misleading. Perhaps the title should have been Article Spinning: Blah blah blah.... instead of article marketing.

Also, as these techniques are only used for link building it's interesting to see the results thrown up by SEOMoz's software concerning what constitutes a good link. Forum sig links, link farm directories etc. I know you guys aren't endorsing these links but people like our friend above starting out in their SEO career are using the tools you provide to direct their work. It's no wonder content based link building is still popular, at least it feels like you're earning a link.

The real injustice is that so many people are playing by the rules and being beaten by cheats, ah, no, wait a minute, that's just life right?

In the last 12 months we've been approached by some big hitters in the world of publishing, household names here in the UK, offering links on their websites, for a fee obviously. I was so very nearly sucked in but managed to resist but there's scarcely a day goes by that I don't wonder about 'joining in' with the whole link cheating game.

As others have said, it's a mess and isn't going to change any time soon unless, as Rand suggested, Google release something significant with respect to algo change.

One of the hardest things is explaining to clients why their high effort site is being trounced by zero effort sites. Business people are not interested in the ethics and whys and wherefores, they just want results.

Totally agree. We can wax lyrical all we like about link building, turning it into some mystical art but the bottom line is sites with blatent spammy link profiles are ranking high. For goodness sake sites that sell links are even showcaing their success stories and still the engines can't susss them out.

Now we have pages about dog biscuits linking to pages about underwear, it's out of control and it's getting to the point where all linking will do is contaminate the SERPs of the major engines relying on links, with irrelevant rubbish. You might argue this has already happened.

We've recently looked at some link building agencies and the quality is just awful. So many seem to be providing spammy side bar list type links and although there might be a short term gain I just can't get excited by these approaches.

The problem is clients want links and advising them can be tricky but this approach will help to explain in a clear and concise way.